Freemasons will appreciate that the ancient Egyptians knew many secret arts, and we can safely assume that the secrets of sound were among them. For instance, there is a fallen obelisk in the great temple complex of Karnak in Luxor and if the ear is placed close to its pyramidal point and the block struck with the hand, the whole piece of granite can be heard to resonate. Goethe referred to architecture as ‘frozen music’ and so it seems to have been in ancient Egypt. Did the temples of the Nile have their own notes, their own sonic frequencies?

Knock On Rock

A new branch of archaeology called ‘archaeoacoustics’ - the study of sound at archaeological sites - is now telling us that sound was important in other and often much older cultures than even that of ancient Egypt. For instance, inside the painted caves of France and Spain, which date back tens of thousands of years, it has been found that some of the stalactites and stalagmites will issue pure bell- or harp-like notes when struck. They display extremely ancient percussion marks.
     Other types of rock can also ring or make musical notes. These ‘lithophones’ or ‘rock gongs’ are now being identified at many sites. In Africa, two hundred lithophones have been found close to prehistoric rock art panels near the fourth cataract of the Nile, and are also in Nigeria, Tanzania, and other parts of the continent. In the Americas, ringing rocks have been found at ancient vision quest sites – lonely places to which Indians resorted to fast and have a vision. In the southern Deccan, India, Cambridge archaeologists were studying Stone Age engravings along a rocky ridge when a local man came up and struck the boulders with a small stone: to the archaeologists’ astonishment they rang like bells. These rock markings date back 4,000 years, but it is perhaps not coincidental that a few hundred miles to the south there is Nellaiyapper temple, where a single block of rock, carved into columns, is able to emit the seven key notes of classical Indian music when struck. This feature dates to c.700 A.D. – did the Stone Age use of natural ringing rocks develop into a sophisticated art in southern India?
     A research team from the Royal College of Art, London, is making a detailed audio-visual study of Mynydd Preseli, southwest Wales, source of the Stonehenge bluestones - the shorter stones at the monument. Some of these spotted dolerite rocks are being found to issue, variously, pure bell-like notes, tin drum sounds, or deep bass gong-like rumbles in the very outcrops from where the Stonehenge stones were extracted. This project can be followed at www.landscape-perception.com.
     It has been a mystery as to why the Preseli bluestones were taken almost two hundred miles to Stonehenge – they clearly had something special about them. Was sound a factor?

Voices Of The Manitous

Echoes are another type of natural sound associated with some sacred places. A classic example occurs at Mazinaw Rock, a cliff-face rising out of Mazinaw Lake in Ontario. The area is known as Bon Echo Provincial Park because the cliff-face produces remarkable echoes. Less well known is that along the bottom of the cliff just above the waterline - a conjunction that enhances echoes - are two hundred panels of red ochre paintings produced by ancestral Algonquin people about a thousand years ago. They cluster where the echoes are strongest. This fits in with an Algonquin belief that spirits (manitous) lived inside cliffs and rocks, and that shamans in trance could pass through the rock surface to obtain ‘rock medicine’ beyond.
     Indeed, this belief was held by many American Indian peoples and probably other peoples around the world – it is known to have existed in southern Africa, for instance. We moderns take sound for granted in our noisy world, but to ancient peoples it could be magical, especially when issuing as music or ghostly echoes from rocks.
     An echo occurs in a very different context at the Castillo, a stepped-pyramid in the Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. Mexico. It has long been noted that the rising equinoctial sun (21 March and September) throws a serrated shadow of a stepped corner of the pyramid onto its northern balustrade, making it appear like a snake descending from the summit temple, which was dedicated to Kukulcan, the feathered serpent.
     It has now been discovered that the north face of the Castillo produces a special echo in response to percussive sounds: it has a ‘chirp’ that is very similar to the primary call of the quetzal bird – the priests of Kukulcan used quetzal feathers in their headdresses. So we may have here a kind of ‘son et lumière’ symbolism. Acoustic symbolism is also now being noted at temples worldwide.
     There are numerous other ways rocks can make sounds. For instance, Petroglyph Rock, Ontario, is a huge, flattish outcrop of rock covered with ancient engravings. Why that particular rock? It may have something to do with a deep fissure cutting across it – at times ground water runs along the bottom of the crack causing noises remarkably like whispering voices. In Britain, as a different type of example, there is a rock known as the Blowing Stone, near Oxford. When a certain weathered hole is blown into, it issues a sound like the call of an elk.

The Old Stones Speak

Archaeologists have now also started to use electronic equipment to probe the sonic secrets of ancient monuments. One Anglo-American team, from International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL), Princeton, used instrumentation to test the primary resonance frequencies of Stone Age chambered monuments – that is, the lowest frequency that produced a standing wave within a chamber.
     They discovered that despite their differing sizes, all the structures they tested resonated in a narrow acoustic frequency band of 95-125 Hertz (cycles per second), with most focusing on 110 Hz.
     Subsequent neuroscientific research has shown this frequency (the lower baritone range of the human voice) to have a marked and unexpected effect on parts of the brain: in tests with 30 subjects, the lowest activity area in the right frontal lobe of the brain switched over completely to the left frontal lobe, while the temporal cortex (at either side of the brain, and associated with language processing) also quietened, though less dramatically so. This regional effect on brain activity was at its maximum at precisely 110 Hz, just as if a switch was thrown.
     The subjective implications of this are currently not understood, but the effect only occurs in the brain’s theta range of electrical activity, which is usually associated with trance and associated conditions. But much more investigation is required to properly explore these findings. ¹
     Archaeological acoustic research is in its infancy as yet but it is already providing new insights about ancient places and will surely allow the old stones to tell us more of their secrets in the years to come.

¹ See I. Cook, et al., ‘Ancient Architectural Acoustic Resonance Patterns and Regional Brain Activity’, Time & Mind, March 2008.

Paul Devereux is not a Freemason but has long been interested in spiritual traditions.
     He is the author of many books and currently co-editor of Time & Mind an academic journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. See www.pauldevereux.co.uk. and timeandmind.bergpublishers.com.